1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to database management systems performed by computers, and in particular, to an RDMA-optimized high performance distributed cache.
2. Description of Related Art
Today's customer demand for instant responsiveness drives applications to exploit various caching schemes. Small-scale applications can rely on local caching and replication. However, when scaling out Internet applications, and the use of clouds, where server-affinity across requests cannot be guaranteed and the data volumes involved are massive, local caching cannot be used anymore. Instead, systems have to rely on partitioned and distributed caches (e.g. WebSphere Extreme Scale™ or Oracle Coherence™) that have to be accessed remotely.
A conventional key-value cache architecture is such that the client sends a request for data to a server over a network passing a key as a parameter. The server performs a key lookup (usually hash-based) in its cache for the associated value-object, e.g., a handle for or pointer to a data object. If found, the data object is serialized and returned to the client. Upon receiving the serialized data object, the client deserializes it and returns it to the requesting application.